


Notes on the Domestication of Birds

by nostalgia



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Babyfic, Birds, F/M, Multi, Supermarkets, Time Babies, UNIT, newcastle, tesco, totally au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 17:43:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1519562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgia/pseuds/nostalgia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor doesn't do domestic. Except when he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Magpie

**Author's Note:**

> old old fic from the days of 2006

"Steven'll be home soon." 

"I'll never get used to calling him that," said Jackie. "I have to keep checking myself in my head." She supposed it was like changing your name when you got married, and perhaps she shouldn’t be blaming him for that. It was quite a normal thing to do, after all.

"I don't," said Rose. "I thought it would be really difficult, but it isn't."

"Do you call him that in bed?" asked Jackie, who had never been what one might call circumspect. 

Rose blushed. "Mum!"

"To be honest with you," she continued, not really wanting to go any further into the topic than the simple provocation of Rose, "I still find the whole thing a bit strange." 

"It's not strange, it's normal." Rose looked at her mother with a hurt expression. "I thought you wanted things to be normal."

Jackie wanted to say that it wasn't normal, that nothing about this was in any way average. For all her willingness to please, she didn't want to pretend otherwise, because it felt like there was enough pretending going on already. And so Jackie, who had never considered herself to be especially fixed on honesty when discretion was needed, found herself drawn to the truth. It was a large pink elephant in the corner of the room, and she could feel it watching her. And this was quite a small flat for such a large elephant to be living in. 

She was saved by having to answer by the return of the Doctor, who was apparently supposed to be called Steven. A cold part of her decided that she couldn't switch names because unlike Rose she wasn't blindly in love with him. It was an uncharitable thought, but not one that seemed entirely unfair. 

"Nice day?" asked Rose, as he came into the living room and sat down next to her on the sofa.

"It was very interesting," he said, kissing her lightly, "An old lady tried to shoplift one of each kind of jam." He put an arm round Rose, the picture of domestication. "Hello, Jackie. How's things?"

Jackie shrugged. "Same as ever. Her next door had the police round again." If she was going to raise the subject of lies, it wasn’t going to be with him. Something told her that he was very, very good at that sort of thing. 

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "She can't just keep stealing animals. How many cats is that she has now?"

"Thirty-seven. The council came round the other week and she said she was just looking after them for someone." 

"You know some very strange people, Jackie Tyler."

Jackie looked at him and tried to work out if that was a challenge. "It takes all sorts," she said, philosophically and as lightly as she could manage. She looked at Rose and tried to convince herself that she could accept one quite large lie in the world if it kept her daughter happy and safe. She had struggled enough for her already, had become well-versed in self-denial.

"It does," said the lie. "That's one of the things I like about working in Tesco. You meet all sorts of people there. It might not look like it, but some of them live incredibly complex lives. They're full of little secrets."

Jackie wondered if they were having subtext. In the past six months she'd had any number of conversations with the Doctor in which some quite important topics were almost entirely avoided while still being alluded to in some way. Sometimes she suspected that he did it to annoy her. He still had an arrogance to him, still played with people's minds like a bored cat might play with a bird.

It frightened her.

"I suppose it's alright to have secrets as long as no one finds out," she said. "As long at it makes you happy."

Rose coughed significantly. "I don't want you two starting something."

"We're just having a chat," said the Doctor, watching Rose's mother carefully. Jackie thought about all the things that Rose couldn’t see when they were right in front of her. 

"I'd best get going," she said, standing up with an instinctive flinch from the thing that didn’t belong.

The concern in Rose’s eyes was for the elements on the surface. "Aren't you going to stay for dinner?"

"Who's cooking?"

"He is."

"Then at least it won't be burned," said Jackie. "I'm going down the pub with Howard." She picked up her coat. "You can come if you want," she said, making it quite clear that they couldn't. "I'll see myself out." She didn’t want an awkward moment at the door with either one of them. 

"I'll drop round tomorrow," called Rose, as though everything was normal. 

She reached the front door and heard Rose say "I thought you two got on now."

"We do,” was the reply, “it's just that I keep expecting her to give me a long talk about not hurting her daughter. I've seen that on TV and it doesn't look very comfortable."

Rose laughed, and Jackie opened the door and shivered as the cold air hit her. "Television's not real life."

"You're right," he said. "Who'd want to watch a TV show about a man who works in a supermarket?"

\--

She did call him Steven in bed. She'd claim it was consistency, but really it was because it made her feel special. She said it like a secret, even though it was the name he used with everyone else. He'd asked her for a name, and she'd chosen one, and now he was hers. 

She knew that he'd had lots of names and that wouldn't tell her all of them, leaving her with the one she'd given him and the one he gave himself. He didn't use those names anymore and it didn't really matter who'd claimed him in the past. 

She asked for one of them.

He lay quietly for a moment, tracing slow patterns on her back with his fingertips. "I don't remember all of them. Some of them I just made up on the spur of the moment."

She listened to his heartbeat. "You must remember some of them." She felt suddenly bold. "What did people yell at you when you broke things when you were a kid?"

"I was a very good child," he said, lightly, "I never broke things. You must be thinking of my invisible twin. He was called Don't and he drove my parents mad. Even though they encouraged him - 'Don't touch that,' 'Don't set the carpet on fire,' 'Don't talk back to people'."

She smiled against his chest. "You never talk about them. Your parents."

"My parents are Ian and Barbara, and they live in Brighton. They were teachers before they retired, which is how they met. They eloped together in 1974, and I was born out of wedlock the previous year, which was very romantic."

"You know what I mean," she said. 

He went very still and very quiet. "I had two names," he said, "because they couldn't decide what to call me. They weren't sure where I was going to grow up, although I think they were, really. They were just lying to themselves. They did that a lot. They were stupid." 

"No they weren't," she said, trying to make it true.

"It doesn't matter. None of that matters anymore." 

"They loved each other."

"Not enough," he said, cold and clipped. 

\--

Rose sat on the couch at her mums, clasping a mug of tea. She looked small and young and Jackie wanted to wrap her up to keep her safe.

"What are you going to do?" she asked. 

"I don't know," said Rose. 

Jackie had practiced this conversation many times over the years. It hadn't generally involved certain complications that veered into the realm of the unusual. "You'll have to decide soon," she said, because that was vague and generic and sounded supportive.

Rose didn't answer, and Jackie tried to decide how best to mention some things that probably needed to be mentioned. She'd read in magazines that it was best to let them mention it, but that tended to be about fifteen-year-olds and Rose was quite capable of ignoring things that didn't fit her nice little version of the world. She wished for a moment that earlier nightmares had come true, because then they wouldn’t be here, now, like this.

She took a breath and just said it straight out. "It might have three eyes."

Rose stared at her, horrified by impropriety or possibility.

"It might," she insisted. "It's father's an alien, which means it's one too. It could have three eyes and tentacles and little claws. It might be dangerous."

"He's not an alien," said Rose, steadily. "Not anymore. He's human."

"So he says." Jackie was aware that there were many things she didn’t understand about the universe, but she was sure that people didn’t just change overnight, regardless of what they’d done to their genes. 

"Mum, he is. He's human, and my baby's human, and..." she tailed off. 

Jackie stroked her daughter's arm and reached for something less horrific. "You're worried he'll change back, aren't you? That he'll leave." 

Rose stared into her tea. "I'm not. It's just all a bit sudden."

"Well, I am." Jackie put her mug down on the coffee table. "You always used to go on about how wonderful all that travelling was, and he was doing that for an awful lot longer than you were. And I know things have been fine so far, but what if he changes his mind? What if you both run off again? What if he doesn't take you with him this time?"

Rose wiped her eyes and blinked a few times. "He loves me."

"I know he does. But life's not that simple." And Rose should know that, more than anyone. 

"I'm not stupid."

Jackie tidied Rose's hair carefully. "I just don't want you ending up like I did. It's so lonely, Rose." She was torn between the urge to comfort her daughter and the need to shake some sense into her. She wanted to be supportive, she really did, but she didn't want to see her tired and old alone with a kid that might not even be human. And she knew the Doctor was a good person, but good people still did stupid things. "Have a think about it," she said. "Give it a few days and then decide."

"Alright." Rose's tea had gone cold. 

"Things'll work out in the end," said Jackie. "Things always work out in the end."

She honestly did hope that this was true. 

\--

"...I can't imagine what it looked like when they x-rayed her." The Doctor closed the door of the washing-machine, chose a setting apparently at random, and switched it on. "You think the world can't get any stranger and then it does. I like that."

"What are your sperm like?" asked Rose. 

The Doctor blinked. "I think you just proved my point."

 

"Really, though."

"Sort of... small and... spermlike." He made a little waving motion with his hand. "Like little tiny tadpoles. Only not," he added, "because that sounds a bit horrible."

"Are they human?" she asked, trying not to make it sound important. 

"They've got half the instructions for building one, if that's what you mean. I suppose it's bit like if you went to IKEA and got some shelves, and the little booklet only had words on the even-numbered pages and they made you go back and have sex with someone before they'd tell you how to put it all together. Except that assumes anyone actually reads those things anyway." He looked thoughtful for a moment.. "Isn't sex surprisingly unsexy when you talk about it like this?"

"They don't have... instructions in alien then?" asked Rose, keen to stay on topic but quite happy to extend the metaphor.

The Doctor leaned on the sink and folded his arms. "I assume not, but you never really know with these things. Gametes are quite complicated. There's a very tiny, miniscule chance that we could end up having kids with the odd exotic gene, but it's not very likely and anyway that's years away. I always think it's best not to worry about your bridges until you've set fire to them."

"I think you should sit down," she said. 

The doorbell rang.

The Doctor looked at Rose with suspicion. "Did you call out for a geneticist?"

Rose followed him to the door, to be confronted with a serious-looking man, all neat clothes and government ID. She felt a sense of inevitability settle over her. It was oddly close to calm, like getting an answer you didn’t want but didn’t have much call not to expect. Some things just weren’t meant to be, she told herself, and put off thinking about what to do next. 

"This won't take long," said the man, walking right in without any invitation.

"Make yourself at home," said the Doctor, pointlessly. "We were just having a conversation about sex. I love it when people interrupt that sort of thing." He followed the intruder in the living-room and Rose went too, thinking with an odd detachment about how much time she spent trailing after him.

The Doctor flopped into an armchair. "What are your thoughts on meiosis?" 

"I'm Mr Swift," said the man, who didn’t seem to feel niceties needed. 

"Are you by any chance from some sort of secret government organisation?" asked the Doctor.

Mr Swift looked pointedly at Rose. She glanced away, not convinced that he was wrong to think of her as the thing that didn’t belong here. 

"This man's from a secret government organisation, Rose. You remember, all those state secrets I told you about?"

She perched on the arm of the chair, unsure and possessive. "I don't mind not staying," she lied.

"Then I'd just have to tell you everything as soon as he was gone. This way it's a lot quicker and then we can get back to that discussion and then perhaps there could a practical demonstration. I've always favoured a hands-on approach to science. So," he continued, "are you from UNIT, Mr Swift?"

"Yes." A simple answer for something that Rose herself was reducing to a simple situation. Endings were always simple, she thought, even if they looked complicated. 

"UNIT are my absolute favourite secret government organisation," the Doctor told Rose. "They combine the secrecy of MI6, the ruthless efficiency of the SAS, and the repressed homoeroticism of the Royal Navy." He settled a hand on her back and she wondered if he was trying to reassure her or just stop her falling too hard.

"We've been looking for you for a while," said Swift, as though this were a perfectly normal conversation. "You're a difficult man to find, Doctor."

"My name's Steven," said the Doctor, firmly. "Steven Foreman." Rose latched onto the name and held it close. 

"Yes, we've heard about your... situation," said Swift. He leaned forward conspiratorially. "To be honest, most of us thought it was a joke at first." He looked at Rose. "No offence."

"It's not a joke, Mr Swift. I really have retired from a life of adventure to shack up with an attractive blonde who's eight hundred and eighty years my juniour." He paused. "Actually it does rather unlikely when you put it like that, doesn't it? And a bit sleazy. Am I sleazy, Rose?" 

"No, you're not," she said, ruffling his hair. She kept her fingers loose, because she knew now that she didn’t have to hold on too tightly.

"We'd like to offer you a job," said Swift.

"I've got a job."

"In a supermarket. That's not really very suited to your skills, is it?"

"Nothing wrong with supermarkets. They're very interesting places." 

"How long have you been on Earth, Mr Foreman?"

"About six months. Are you wondering when I'll get bored?"

Rose tensed again, and the hand on her back pressed closer as her muscles pulled taut. 

"I'm sure once you've settled in a bit-"

"I am settled in," said the Doctor. "I'm very settled. I'm very happy as well. I haven't the slightest inclination to do anything other than live an average and unremarkable life. So I'm not going to work for you, and I'd appreciate it if you lot just left me alone from now on."

Swift looked at the Doctor for a remarkable length of time. Finally, he stood up. "Sorry to have troubled you, Mr Foreman. We like to try and maximise our resources as a matter of course. I'm sure you understand."

The Doctor smiled. "Absolutely." He jumped up from the armchair and shook the man's hand. "It was very nice to meet you."

Rose went over to the sofa and sat down on it as the Doctor went to show the man from the secret government organisation out. She settled against it, warm and feeling safe. It was just a test, she told herself, a test to see if she’d crumble. And she almost had, but that was alright, because everyone needed something and she was just like everybody else.

The Doctor collapsed onto the sofa beside her. "They'll be back," he said, darkly. “They’re like magpies, picking up shiny things for their collection.”

"What was that about?" she asked, just to see how he’d answer. She felt the need to push a little, to see how secure the tether was. 

He sighed. "People who can't accept change." 

Rose chewed her lip. "You're not leaving then?"

“Of course not." He looked shocked, and she tried not let him see how good that made her feel.

"I mean, you're definitely staying? For good?"

"Rose," he said, carefully, "have you changed your mind about this?" He looked strangely vulnerable, and she felt bad about the little thrill that ran through her to see him like that. She realised how easily she could break him, felt glad despite herself that this at least hadn’t changed.

"No, I just... I thought you might want to off and something exciting." Not everything changed, after all. Some things just stayed the same forever. 

"This _is_ exciting. Well, maybe not exciting, but I like it. I love it." 

She looked at him and thought about everything he'd given up for this. For her. She told herself that he wasn't going to leave, and the thought seemed obvious and as inevitable as the fact that she’d thought he would. "D'you want to have kids?" she asked.

"How many?"

"One's the usual," she said. "Sometimes you get two. We could see how it goes after that."

"Yeah, that sounds reasonable. Start small, work your way up."

"We could do that then."

"Alright. When?"

Rose leaned her head on his shoulder. "In about seven months?"


	2. Mother Goose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor is tested and meets an old friend.

"I'm sick of orange juice," complained Rose when the Doctor returned from the bar.

"I got you crisps," he said, dropping the placatory gift in front of her as he sat down with a pint of John Smith's. 

"They're not low-fat." 

The Doctor stared at her, incredulous. "Rose, you have a small human inside you. One packet of crisps is not going to make all the difference." A thought struck him. "I'm not saying you're fat."

Rose glowered at him and opened her crisps.

"You're not fat," he said. "Well, you are, but only by comparison with how thin you used to be. Besides, it's not a bad thing. Not that you're shallow or anything like that. I don't think I'd love you if you were shallow, and I do, so you can't be." He realised he was floundering a bit. "I want to stop talking and I can't. Words keep coming out of my mouth and I have no control over it."

Shareen leaned across the table and patted Rose on the shoulder. "You're not fat. You're just pregnant. It's a completely different thing. Anyway," she added, "not long now and it'll be out."

Rose took a sip of her drink. "I had a dream that it just stayed there forever, getting bigger and bigger until it burst out of me like that thing in _Alien_."

Shareen stole a crisp. "Nah, it comes out the same way it got in. So you're alright as long as you haven't shagged an alien."

Rose choked on her orange juice. 

The Doctor patted her on the back. "Are you okay?"

"It just went down the wrong way," she managed. 

"You should make sure they give you lots of drugs," said Shareen, oblivious. "My sister was in labour for two days with her first one. She punched Aravinder in the face at one point and they had to take him to the A&E. He needed stitches and everything." She looked at the Doctor. "I'm sure Rose won't do that."

"I've known a few violent women in my time," he said. "Not in the Biblical sense," he added.

Shareen stared at him blankly.

"He didn't shag them," said Rose. 

"Oh, right. I thought he meant he hadn't read about them in books."

The Doctor quite admired Shareen's willingness to admit when she didn't know things, but thought better of mentioning it to her. 

Rose looked at her watch. "We should go home before people start arriving for the football." 

"I think it might be cancelled," said the Doctor, who had noticed something on the over-sized TV above the bar. He slipped his glasses on and watched the screen intently.

Rose looked up to see news footage of something she was experienced enough to recognise as an extra-terrestrial spacecraft. Or most of one, at least.

"We've got some unexpected visitors."

"I hate aliens," said Shareen.

"Still," said the Doctor, "no concern of ours, is it?" He put his specs in his pocket and settled down to finish his pint.

\--

Rose didn't say anything until they got back. She wasn't sure what to make of the Doctor's sudden lack of interest in the unusual, or even if he'd simply put it on for appearances' sake. On the way home he'd walked at a perfectly calm pace, had _not_ tried to go the way that would take them past the TARDIS, and had talked about the difficulties of deciding whether they should put the baby in yellow on principle or if it was easier just to go with pink so that people would know what sort it was without having to ask.

She thought he might say something about it when they got back to the flat. After all, there were some things it was best not to mention in public. So when they got back she sat down at the kitchen table and waited.

"I was thinking we could have lasagne," he said, rummaging around in the cupboard.

"That was an alien spaceship," she said, in case he’d missed this fact. "From another planet."

"They usually are, yes." He held up the Italian Seasoning. "Last of the Thyme Lords?" He caught her expression and turned apologetic. "Sorry, that wasn't very funny, was it?"

"You don't need to lie about it," she said. "I know you're interested. I know you want to go and have a look. I do as well, and I don't need you pretending that there's nothing weird going on when there is." She relented a bit. "It's quite sweet, though."

"I'm not going to get involved," he said. "Steven Foreman does not go looking for aliens."

"You could watch it on the telly," she suggested, keen for a compromise in an abnormal situation.

"I'm not sure that'd be such a good idea," he said, carefully. "You should, though. Since you're interested. Go and put your feet up."

Rose looked at him and saw all the things he was trying to hide from her. All the energy and the curiosity and the need to keep moving. Things she loved and feared at the same time. Things that she didn't really want to think about either.

"I'll go and watch a film," she said.

\--

She went to see her mum most days, because she didn't want to feel anchored to the flat by the weight of her own child. They didn't talk about the aliens, aside from a shared sigh of relief that it didn't look like the planet was about to be pulled out from underneath them. 

On the way back she went to see the TARDIS, convinced that it would somehow have changed since its distant cousin smashed into the Lake District and died. She wasn't sure how it would know, but she still dreamt dim memories of places she'd never been, remnants of the day she opened it up and made a wish. There was something in there, not quite living, and the Doctor had just left it. 

Sometimes she wondered if it felt jealous.

It looked the way it always did: a tall blue box tucked away in a corner, collecting the names of the kids who wrote on it, the walls a growing list of love and loss and feuds and friendships. 

She realised she'd been scared it wouldn't be there anymore. 

When she touched the door, it was cold and still under her hand. She wondered if he did this sometimes, wondered about the key he kept on a chain around his neck. It wasn't going to open itself to anyone, not unless it was to get him back. 

She wondered how long it would take until it finally died.

"What's inside you?" she whispered, and her words echoed back from the box.

\--

When she got home there were voices in the living-room. The Doctor was deep in conversation with an old man she'd never seen before. 

"Ah, there she is," said the Doctor, beckoning her over to the sofa. "This is Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. He used to work for UNIT. We go way back."

She could see, immediately, the reason for the visit. Emotional blackmail was rearing its head and she wondered for a moment if she would fall back on the same methods herself if it came to it. She wondered if she already had.

"You must be Rose," said Alistair. "He's been telling me all about you. Although he did leave a few things out," he added, taking in her current proportions. There was something buried in his gaze that was almost an accusation, a thought not entirely hidden about creating situations people couldn’t escape from. 

The Doctor put an arm round her, smothering the suspicion he probably didn’t even know about. "Well, we're not sure if it's a baby or a very large tapeworm. We're hoping it's a baby, though."

"It's a girl," said Rose. She wasn’t going to let them avoid the subject she knew they’d been discussing before she arrived. "You're here about that spaceship, aren't you? You want him to have a look at it for you." She knew she seemed defensive and she didn't care. 

"Miss Tyler, you have to understand that the Doctor-"

"Steven. His name's Steven." Because he was. He was hers and no one had any right to take him away from her. 

" _Steven_ has a lot of information in that rather bizarre head of his that would be very useful for our inquiries. I'm not here in any sort of official capacity, but I admit to having an interest in the matter."

"And I've been steering the conversation onto all sorts of fascinating yet unrelated topics," said the Doctor. He seemed quite proud of that, and Rose was pleased. 

"They're digging up fossils to get you back," said Alistair.

"If they send round the late Mrs Thatcher I'm not letting her in."

"They only want to give you your old job back."

"I'm not the old me," said the Doctor in a tone Rose hadn't heard for a long time. It gave the statement an element of deception she didn’t want to hear. 

"It's your decision," said Alistair, diplomatically. 

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" 

Rose closed her eyes. "Stop it. I'm tired and I don't need people sniping at each other." What she wanted was something to reassure her, and didn’t want to hear this pass that point and move into words that would just bring the worry back to her again.

The Doctor kissed her forehead. "Sorry." He put a hand on her belly. "Your parasite's on the move again."

Rose disentangled herself and stood up with some difficulty. "You two go out or something. I'm going to have a lie down."

\--

"I feel like a spy," said the Doctor, cheerfully. "Walking round a park talking about secret government conspiracies. That's like being a spy. Or like that bit in _Good Omens_."

"UNIT is not a conspiracy," said Alistair, mildly but firmly. 

"It sort of is. It has elements of conspiracy. And a sort of Cold War retro feel to it all."

"I thought we agreed never to talk politics unless it was essential to the future of the planet?"

"Did we?" The Doctor was slightly concerned by this possibility, since that seemed to leave very little to talk about. Possibly it left toast, but that wasn't the most interesting of topics.

"We did," said Alistair. "And now I expect you're thinking that this leaves nothing to talk about."

The Doctor laughed at that. "You know me far too well. " 

"Do I though?" Alistair stopped walking and sat down on a bench. "I didn't expect to see you settle down. You always hated staying in one place." 

The Doctor sat next to him and watched a duck waddle past. "I made a choice. I like choices." He’d made a decision, and the decisions that spawned from that one had been simple to go along with. He could be quite determined when he wanted something. 

"You’re actually going to stay here, work in a supermarket, live one day at a time – in sequence - and then die?" Alistair sounded incredulous and the Doctor couldn’t blame him for that. 

"I like to think of it in less morbid terms but yes. Why not?"

"Something happened," said Alistair, "and you won't tell me what it is, but it changed you."

He shrugged it off. "Lot of things happened. Wars. Death. Turmoil. Same as always, really. Maybe it's a midlife crisis. Maybe I'm just sick of it. Maybe I just got bored."

"And who's going to save the universe every week while you're off being Steven Foreman, defender of the Tesco Metro?"

"Alistair," he sighed, "the universe managed fine before I was even a twinkle in my mother's eye. Not that I like to think of my parents having sex, but I have to admit that they must have done it on a minimum of one occasion."

"That's another change, you never mentioned parents before. I wasn't sure if you even had any."

"Of course I had parents. Did you think I was grown in a vat or something?"

"It was always a possibility."

"Well I wasn't." The Doctor paused briefly and then said, "This is the point at which you say 'speaking of parents' and broach the subject you've been trying to find a subtle way of getting onto." One thing that had changed in him was a greater willingness to accept the inevitable. He wasn’t sure if that was mere biology or the equally human inability to change the world when it wasn’t turning out the way one wanted it to.

"Speaking of parents," breezed Alistair, "I still haven't the faintest idea how to put certain things diplomatically."

"A man with your vocabulary?"

"Alright then. Why her?"

"Why not her? Why you and Doris?"

"I didn’t retire for Doris. Besides, we're not talking about me."

The Doctor leaned back and thought for a moment. "I don't know, really. Either it's incredibly complicated or it's incredibly simple. She's interesting? She's compassionate? She’s really good in bed? She's intelligent? But so are lots of people." He scratched the back of his neck absently. "She's... well, she makes me feel less old. She's got warmth and passion and charm. There, that's quite a good list, isn't it?" He was aware that the list was probably not the one he would have come up with before, but he’d never made one to compare it to.

Alistair laughed.

"What?"

"I just wanted to know how hopeless the situation was."

"Oh, thanks." The Doctor felt a strange flinch inside him at the word ‘hopeless’. It wasn’t really a word he’d spent much time with before. Hopeless had been the state things were in when he arrived somewhere, not a description of one into which he’d placed himself. But then that assumed that this whole thing had not been in some way – that word again – inevitable.

"And now there's a baby on the way. Have you thought of a name yet?"

"I always thought Serendipity would be a lovely name for a child," said the Doctor. 

"Until it found out what that meant."

"You'd have a few years of grace until that happened."

"Never underestimate the importance of long term planning. Don't you at least have a shortlist?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Rose thinks we should just wait and see what she looks like, but that won't work because we'll have to name her while she's still a baby and babies look like Winston Churchill. You can't call a girl Winston."

"Winifred."

"Ah, your replacement. How is she these days?" He found that he was quite relieved that the conversation had changed trajectory, as he suspected that it had been heading in directions that mentioned the reliability of contraception. There was a place at the back of his mind he wanted to avoid which occasionally posed questions about carelessness and whether he really did, on some subconscious level, worry that Rose alone wouldn’t be enough to keep him here. 

"Doing splendidly. Should be at the very top in a few years." 

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. "Winifred. Old English, 'friend of peace'. It's a good name."

"I'm sure General Bambera would be pleased to hear that. She was never really sure about you."

The Doctor felt rather offended. "I stopped someone blowing her up with a nuclear missile! Her own nuclear missile, at that."

"I think she found the whole thing rather embarrassing. Still, she did get a husband out of it."

The Doctor watched a woman walk past with a pram. "Rose's boyfriend died," he said. "Well, they weren't really together anymore, but she cared about him."

"Ah."

"It wasn't my fault. Except it was. It was sort of complicated. And things were weird after that. I don't think Rose had realised that could happen." He rubbed his eyes. "I don't think I had, really. Sometimes you just forget how fragile they are."

"I hope this isn't some attempt at penance."

"It's not. But I think that's when she started wanting to go back home. Back here. And then I had to make a choice. And I'm glad I did, I really am. I've got a family now. I've got a home. I've got lots of things I never really thought I wanted." 

Alistair nodded. "I thought there was something troubling you."

"And Gallifrey's gone." He hadn’t expected to say it, not to someone who’d know what it meant.

"The whole planet?" Alistair looked shocked.

"All of it. Everyone. I'm the last. Was the last. Not much point being the last of something, is there? It sounds romantic, but it's horrible. I hated it. And I'm the one that did it. I blew it up. 'Damage limitation' I think was the phrase. Like bombing the French at Mers-El-Kebir."

"I'm sorry," said Alistair. He winced. "I hate it when people say that." 

"I got over it."

"No you didn't."

"No, you're right." He was silent for a moment. "Do you ever feel really old?"

"All the bloody time," said Alistair.


	3. Hatching Chicks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor is up to his old tricks.

The doorbell rang just as _Eastenders_ was starting. The Doctor cursed this interruption and opened the door to cold November air and a man who looked exactly like an Oxford-educated government official trying not to look like one. He felt that this did not bode well.

“Steven Foreman?” asked the man.

The Doctor considered the odds of the man not actually knowing the answer, decided they were minimal, and said “Yes.” 

“Robin Collins,” said the man, extending a hand. “There’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you, if you’re not too busy.”

The Doctor ignored the hand and leaned on the doorframe. “I’m guessing it’s not about double-glazing.”

Collins smiled uncomfortably. “No, it isn’t.”

“Central heating? Kitchen fixtures?”

"No.”

“Internet service provider? Life insurance? Matter of national security?”

“It's something I can't talk about out here. Can I come in?” 

“If you must.”

\--

"You said you'd help out if there was something that no one else could do," said Collins, producing a thick folder from a very expensive-looking briefcase. 

“Did I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Got that in writing, have you?”

“Actually, yes. Your signature’s quite easy to copy. I like the cross on the T, by the way.”

“I don’t think I like where this is going.”

“And,” he continued, smoothly, “we have a situation that could use someone with your skills.”

"What skills? You can’t need an alien, because I’m not anymore. And it's not the TARDIS because you're not getting anywhere near that. And let’s not get into things that’d put the words ‘contaminate’ and ‘timeline’ in the same sentence." 

"We need a supermarket manager with high-level security clearance." 

The Doctor blinked. "Oh."

"On rather short notice."

"I see."

\--

"I don’t have to decide right away,” he said, when the man was gone. “They don’t need to know until Wednesday.”

Rose sat across from him at the kitchen table, trying to be calm about the whole thing. “And then what?”

“Well, I’d have to go to Newcastle. Probably right away. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to sort out, I’d imagine,” he added hurriedly. "And it’s a Sainsburys. So that’s not too bad. It's not like they want me to work in an ASDA."

Rose looked at him and saw someone she hadn't seen for several years. There was a spark in his eyes and a deliberateness to his words that she associated with someone else entirely. "You’ve already decided to go, haven’t you?"

"I’m... leaning towards it," he admitted.

"You said you weren’t going to do this stuff anymore."

"And I don’t. It’s just this one time. I do owe them that much, really."

"It might be dangerous. What if you get killed? Have you thought about that?" 

"I was thinking more along the lines of saving the planet, to be honest. And since we live on this planet that'd be a good thing."

"Saving the planet." Rose bit her lip to stop herself saying that she'd forgotten they used to do that.

"Well, I'll only be finding an alien in a supermarket, but it's a contribution."

"Steven," she said, fighting the instinct to use a name she hadn't given him in years, "you said everything was going to be normal."

"I won't go if you don't want me to," he said, and she wondered if he realised he was giving her the 'I want something' look.

She shook her head. "Don't you dare. Don't pretend I'm being stupid about this. You promised me, Steven. You said."

He reached across the table and took her hand. "I know and I'm not trying to get out of that. Yes, I want to go. I honestly think they need me." 

"We need you."

"It's only a couple of weeks. At most. If things start looking dangerous I'll come home."

"What if you don't?"

"What if I get run over by a bus?"

She glared at him. "Stop that. I remember what it was like, I know you do stupid things. I remember that time you _did_ die. Only this time you won't just change, this time you'll be gone forever."

"Rose, we're talking about the entire planet. If I don't go it's quite likely that we'll all die anyway." 

"I know that. I'm not going to stop you. If you think they need you then go. Just make sure you come back." 

He nodded and stood up. "I'll go and phone them, then. Let them know." He took the chain with the TARDIS key on it from around his neck and handed placed it in her hand. "Here. Just in case."

"In case what?"

He shrugged. "In case anything." He kissed her forehead and left the kitchen.

Rose wondered when exactly she'd started believing the things they told other people, when the invented biography had taken over. When it had stopped feeling like they were only lying. She knew there'd been a point, years ago, when the Doctor had started being Steven in her head, and a point where she'd started to believe that, yes, she really did meet him outside a chip shop. The bit she hadn't noticed was the point she must have passed to get to this one, the one where she was scared that if Steven went to Newcastle, the Doctor might come back without him. 

\--

It was a nice enough place, for a Sainsburys. It was bright and airy and the people didn't look too miserable. Some of them looked a bit scared, but that was only to be expected given that the previous manager had had his face eaten off by what was probably an alien. 

A man approached him, with what was probably supposed to be a welcoming smile. It looked a bit fake. "Nigel Singh," said the man. "I’m the assistant manager here."

The Doctor shook his hand, taking the opportunity to check for extra fingers or the wrong sort of pulse. "Steven Foreman. I like your tie."

"From Tescos, aren’t you?"

"Yes. I'm told some things are a bit different in Sainsburys but supermarkets are a bit like bicycles, aren’t they? Once you know how to ride one, you never really forget."

"Let's hope so," said Nigel, in a slightly threatening but probably human manner.

The Doctor smiled cheerfully. "You wanted Mr Burwell's job, didn't you?"

Nigel blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You thought since he was dead you'd get promoted. And I'm sure you should have been. Life's horribly unfair like that, isn't it? Perhaps that's what Mr Burwell was thinking as he died. That life was unfair, not that you'd get promoted. Although perhaps he did. I suppose we'll never know." The Doctor smiled again, quite pleased to have started as he meaned to go on.

"I'm sure there were good reasons they brought you in."

"Well, I hope so. Perhaps people have invested too much faith in me. That's happened before. Not recently, but it has happened. I’d like to speak to all the staff at some point," he continued. "Quite soon, if that’s possible. Individual interviews, get to know them."

Nigel gave him a slightly horrified look, "Why would you want to do that?"

"Who knows what terrible secrets they may be hiding?"

\--

"Lucy Smith," he read from the folder in front of him. The Doctor looked up at the woman and smiled. "Hello, Lucy Smith."

Lucy Smith nodded shakily.

"Do you like it here, Lucy?"

"Yes. I love it here," she said.

"Really?"

"Best job I ever had."

"Why?"

Lucy looked about nervously. "I like making a contribution to the retail experience."

The Doctor leaned across the desk and tried to look non-threatening. "I’m not going to fire you, Lucy."

The tension drained out of her in an instant. "Oh, thank God. It’s just that Mr Burwell only ever saw people to sack them."

The Doctor nodded, having spoken to a remarkable number of terrified people in the space one afternoon. "So I hear. He sounds awful."

"Not that I’m happy he died," she added hastily. 

"Did you kill him?"

"No!"

"Just asking." He leafed through a file casually. "Perhaps he died of natural causes. Natural face-eating causes."

\--

Not many people knew that a secret government organisation owned a third-floor one-bedroom flat just off Westgate Road. It wasn’t a bad flat, but it had horrible curtains and the air of having had a number of temporary occupants with fake names. The phone had an unlisted number and was certainly bugged. The Doctor plugged in his mobile and sat down on the bed.

He felt that he wasn’t really getting anywhere with this. The staff were lovely people, but none of them seemed especially alien. He couldn’t outright ask someone if they were a face-eating alien, and he knew how relatively easy it was to pass for human even if you weren’t.

With the initial novelty of the situation having worn off he was starting to worry that he was the wrong person for the job. Maybe he wasn’t good at this stuff anymore. Nearly four years on the one planet and he’d gone off his game. Thinking with a human brain was like swimming in treacle and he’d forgotten that, somehow. He’d probably already missed some subtle and essential hint as to what was really going on. What if he kept on missing things? What if it all went wrong somehow?

He might actually get killed. The Doctor imagined someone telling Rose, " _we're sorry, but something has eaten your husband’s face off._ " 

It wasn’t the most optimistic line of thinking, but it wasn’t entirely unrealistic. He thought about phoning someone, but Alistair would just try to convince him it was going to be easy and Rose would try to get him to come home. 

On a very basic level, he was annoyed by the whole thing. People were expecting him to be exciting and alien and reckless and he wasn’t, not anymore. He knew no one had looked at his file and seen " _husband, father, supermarket manager_ ". Even if they had they’d also read words like " _currently_ " or _"pretending to be._ " He was fairly certain that there was only person on the entire planet who wasn’t on some level convinced that he was going to turn round one day and chuck the whole thing in. And she was two years old and couldn’t tie her own shoelaces.

Which was another line of thinking that wasn’t really all that helpful.

Confidence, or the appearance thereof, was probably the way to go. Tallying his resources he managed to come up with a) having done this before with significant advantages that he didn’t have any more and b) knowing about supermarkets. It wasn’t the most comforting list.

He did have one thing that wasn’t entirely local. He retrieved it from where it lay wrapped in a t-shirt under the pillow. He hadn’t actually used the sonic screwdriver in this new life, but he’d kept as … well, as insurance. It wasn’t breaking the rules of being human if he never used it and it wasn’t – at all, in any way – a memento. 

It chirped into life and he realised how incredibly relieved he was that the power cell hadn’t died in the interim. It would be cheating, yes, but so was invading the Earth via the medium of a Sainsburys supermarket. 

That fact in itself was lessened the worry somewhat. It meant that he probably wasn’t dealing with someone that could muster an invasion fleet or blow up the planet from orbit. And all he really had to do was locate, inform, go home. And avoid being eaten. Presumably something that ate faces wouldn’t be too hard to spot if it was trying to kill you, but it was best not to provoke a confrontation. 

Not if you didn’t want to get killed.

\--

Jay Whitmore, shelf-stacker and closet Sunderland supporter, was watching him again. The Doctor could think of any number of reasons why someone would want to look at him, and one of those would be the nervousness of an alien under suspicion. Best, he decided, to rule out the more flattering options first. 

"Jay," he smiled, intercepting the man in the pet food section. "How are you?"

"I'm... fine?" 

"You look unhappy. Fight with the spouse? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?"

"I'm not with anyone right now, Mr Foreman."

"Steven," insisted the Doctor, trying to flutter his eyelashes and suspecting it just looked like he had something in his eye. He worried a bit about the possibility of being fired for sexual harassment from a job that wasn't even his own by any conventional understanding, but decided that the safety of the planet was probably worth it. He edged slightly closer. "That's some very neat shelf-work. It shows an organised mind."

"...thanks."

"If there were awards for shelf-stacking I'm sure you'd win one. And there should be awards for that." He pressed his mouth against the man's ear and whispered, "Are you an alien?"

Jay looked at him as though he suspected the Doctor of complete insanity. "No."

"Are you sure?"

Jay looked about furtively and then moved in far too close. The Doctor wondered if he'd gone a bit far with the overtures.

"I'm with UNIT," whispered Jay.

"Oh." The Doctor glared at an old woman who was staring at them. "Do you mind? This is a private moment." 

"In case you need back-up," said Jay, who was, now that the Doctor came to think of it, quite warm and solid in interesting and not entirely unpleasant ways. Not really ways a married man should be thinking about in the middle of a supermarket, but interesting nonetheless.

"That's very thoughtful," he said, carefully.

"I'd feel terrible if you were eaten by an alien."

"I think I would too. As would my wife," he added hastily, as much for himself as for anyone else who might be around to hear it. 

"Oh, yeah, her," said Jay, stepping away slightly.

The Doctor smoothed his own tie carefully. "Yes. You know, actually, it might be an idea if we don't talk to each other again, in case anyone suspects something. Of a non-sexual nature. Not that you aren't a very attractive man, because you are and if I was single I'd love to sleep with you and I'm going to stop talking now."

"I'll get back to my shelves," said Jay, adding what the Doctor felt was an entirely unnecessary wink.

"I'll get back to... whatever it is I was doing."

He decided not to try that strategy again. 

\--

By the third day the Doctor was still lacking an alien, but had managed to confuse people enough that they didn't seem to mind too much if he just asked them openly about whether they'd ever killed someone. He was careful to do this only when there were a lot of other people around, since he was quite attached to his face and didn't want to upset Rose by going home dead. 

One of the check-out girls had greeted him quite happily that morning with the news that the weather was lovely and she wasn't an alien. He hoped that this was a positive development, rather than proof that people were quite happy to say any old thing to him to see how he'd react. 

He was still trying to decide if Nigel Singh was an alien or just very bad at being human. The Doctor felt that he himself was quite good at being human despite only having been one for a few years, and was quite familiar with the concept that some humans weren't all that skilled at it even though they'd been doing it all their lives. Perhaps Nigel was one of those people. Which was why the Doctor had decided to have a little chat with the assistant manager when he ran into him on the way to the office. 

"Nigel," he said, "I've observed that you seem to have quite an adverserial attitude to other people."

"Do I?" asked Nigel, in a slightly confrontational manner.

"Yes. I was just wondering if that was a deliberate thing. Some sort of persona by which you hope to terrify people into doing your bidding." 

"I think you're confusing aggression with drive. I've noticed that you have a very laid-back management style, and perhaps that works in a Tesco Metro, but some of the people here can be quite difficult to deal with."

"As Mr Burwell found out in such a horrifying manner."

Nigel raised an eyebrow. "You think one of the staff did it? I heard it was rats."

"You really are an astonishingly unimaginative man, aren't you, Nigel?"

"I try."

"One more thing," said the Doctor, pausing at the door, "I don't suppose there's any chance you're a visitor from another planet? A non-terrestrial? An alien?"

Nigel look at him, incredulous. "If I was an alien, would I really be working in a supermarket?"

"You know, I ask myself that every day," said the Doctor, closing the office door behind him.

\--

The Doctor was quite concerned by all the boxes. Back at Tesco - _his_ Tesco at least - boxes and crates and sundry other containers were kept neat and tidy in the storeroom until needed. They didn't lie around in the staff areas and get piled up in the middle of the shop floor. It made the place to look cluttered and the staff look unprofessional. Luckily, the Doctor had a clipboard, a biro, and what he considered to be a quite a sharp mind. 

"What are you doing?"

The Doctor looked up from his notes. "I thought we weren't going to talk to each other again, Jay."

"You were writing something down," said the shelf-stacker who wasn't, "I thought you might have come up with something."

"I have, Jay, I have. I've come up with the fact that this Mr Burwell must have been a terrible store manager. There are boxes everywhere, the supply forms aren't filed properly, there are whole sections that run out of stock by mid-afternoon. The personnel side's absolutely fine, but in terms of supply and demand I really don't think we're fulfilling our duty to the customer."

Jay took the clipboard from him. "You're not supposed to be managing a supermarket. You're supposed to be," he glanced about carefully, "looking for something that wouldn't normally be in a Sainsburys."

"And I've found something that wouldn't normally be here. Incompetence. Doesn't the area manager pay any attention? You'd never get away with this sort of thing in a Tesco." He sighed. "Sometimes I think that Sainsburys is a sign of everything that is wrong with this country."

Jay, who had become surprisingly loyal to his place of undercover employment, rolled his eyes. "At least it doesn't sell Tesco Value." 

"There is nothing wrong with the Tesco Value range," protested the Doctor. "Tesco Value has everything you could ever possibly want. Tesco Value cheese, Tesco Value beans, Tesco Value bread, Tesco Value cola, Tesco Value cutlery, Tesco Value tampons. That's a tasty meal _and_... well, and some tampons."

"Fine, but that doesn't have anything to do with the... with the A-L-I-E-N."

"I think these people can spell. These people went to good schools. That's why they're shopping in Sainsburys instead of in a proper supermarket. It pains me to stand here, in this clean and over-priced fruit and veg aisle, and know that it's entirely possible that every single person who is in building by choice voted Conservative at the last election."

"Conservatives don't eat people's faces. You need to get your priorities in order."

"Are you in the army? Or are you on the Whitehall side of things?"

Jay leaned in closer, "We're in the middle of a supermarket," he whispered. He seemed a bit irritated for some reason.

"I know," said the Doctor, slightly quieter but still above what was probably the appropriate volume for discussing such matters, "which is why no one's likely to think we're talking about a secret government conspiracy."

"We're not a conspiracy."

"I'm supposed to be getting an eye operation," said the Doctor. He tapped his glasses. "I'm going to go back with these and everyone will think I just lied. They might think I'm having an affair. I've never had an affair, but I imagine you'd have to be quite discreet. If you want I could pretend I'm having an affair with you and then I might be a bit more subtle about things."

Jay sighed. "Alright, fine, whatever helps."

"You never take me anywhere," sulked the Doctor, "and we haven't had sex. Ever." 

"Now you're just being annoying."

"Didn't you get a little dossier thing about me? I bet that would have been in it. 'Is annoying.' By the way, are you sure it's only the late Mr Burwell that's met an unsightly end? Because to me that suggests our visitor got here quite recently. Eating people's quite a difficult habit to hide. He, she or it might have borrowed a body but won't be used to it yet. Oh, have you got someone checking the bins? Because I'm not going to do that. Can I have my clipboard back now, please?"

Jay handed back the clipboard and gave a satisfied nod. "Just as long as you remember why you're here."

"I'm having a fake eye operation and an illicit affair that isn't happening and isn't even very good."

"Why supermarkets?"

"What about them?"

"What is is that attracts aliens to supermarkets?"

"Well, not being an alien I couldn't possibly say."

Jay nudged him with an elbow. "Do you miss it?"

"Will you get me flowers?"

"What?"

"I think if we're having an affair you should at least get me flowers. I'm risking a lot for this, you know. If my wife finds out she might divorce me and I only just got married last year." The Doctor considered this for a moment. "Well, we were living in sin for ages before that, but I expect I was seeing other people at the time. What a complete bastard. No wonder I'm sleeping with a man who works in a Sainsburys."

Jay stared at him. "I don't understand you at all."

The Doctor leaned towards Jay. "I have an unusual ability," he whispered, conspiratorially.

"What is it?"

"You know how we were saying about Conservatives? It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that people are right-wing and you just can't quite believe it because everyone looks so normal. I can feel it, I can feel them watching me. I can look at someone and know that even with the provisions of the Secret Ballot Act of 1872 I know how they voted. It's the way they stand, like they own this country and everything in it. Like they're working out how much you cost them every single day of your life. And you pass them in the street with your kid in a pushchair and they look at you and you can see the little cogs going in their heads as they try to decide whether you're a single parent and then you come to places like this and the stench of conservatism starts destroying your soul." He turned and smiled at a tall woman with a fake tan and a designer suit, "Can I help you?"

\--

Sometimes it was best not to concentrate on things and instead just let everything tick away at the back of your mind. Very often if you slept on a problem you would wake up with a fair idea of what to do. Believing this completely, the Doctor went to sleep and tried to dream about supermarkets, investigative techniques and face-eating aliens. 

He woke up on Thursday morning cold, alone, and no closer to an answer. He did however have a GNER ticket from Newcastle Station to Kings Cross that was looking increasingly tempting. 

It occurred to him that if he'd seen himself like this a few years ago he would been appalled. There would have been a stirring and slightly-too-long speech about the importance of not giving up and the value of an individual. Then he would probably have given himself a good slap.

He'd changed, he really had changed. And he didn't know how much of that was the simple fact of being human. There was a loss of confidence that he hadn't anticipated, a need for security and certainty. Especially worrying was his complete failure to notice how far the change had gone until faced with this tantalising fragment of his old life.

 _I'm not the man I was_ , he thought, and resented this for being a mind-shatteringly unoriginal thought.

The worst thing was that he knew exactly what was wrong stopping him working the whole thing about. He was holding back, or possibly holding _on_. Falling back into old habits might change him again, and he'd somehow convinced himself that it was a choice between finding an alien in a Sainsburys and going home to Rose and Winifred.

They wouldn't be the first family he'd turned his back on.

And that was a stupid line of reasoning, because the situations were totally different. He knew that. He also knew that becoming human was as much about making himself stay as anything else. Going back to his old life would mean having to change back; he couldn't just skip off one afternoon, spend a decade toppling empires, and be back for dinner as though nothing had happened. It also meant that he'd built the entire thing up in his head as a binary either/or. 

 

He took the day off, since neither of his alleged employers could actually sack him in any case. He could wander round the city for a bit and see if he could get his head sorted out. He could distract himself from all this self-doubt and then he'd be fine. Absolutely fine. 

So he did the tourist thing. He admired the bridges on the Tyne, looked at some old churches, and went once round on the Metro on the basis that it was there and he might as well. He explored the city's very small and rather surprising Chinatown and discovered that Newcastle's 'thriving gay scene' consisted of two pubs, one of which had a rather disappointing selection of crisps.

Eldon Square Shopping Centre appeared to be larger on the inside and he managed to get lost at one point, but it did yield a postcard of the Angel of the North, which he'd always felt was a marvellous piece of work even if it did look a bit like an upended 747. He couldn't actually think of anything to write on the postcard, so he just addressed it, drew a smiley face in the space for the message, stuck a stamp on and posted it. He thought about getting Rose something expensive and worried that this was a manifestation of his guilt over the affair he was having with Jay Whitmore before he remembered that he'd just made that up in his head. He got her a mug with her name on it instead, because he couldn't think of anything else to get her.

In the Forbidden Planet on Grainger Street he bought the DVD of the 1953 version _War of the Worlds_ (which was, of course, superior to the 2005 version) and a film he thought Winifred might like, about an old man who built a time-space machine in his back garden and ended up fighting foam-spraying robots on another planet. It looked utterly ludicrous and just the sort of non-educational thing that books had told him never to show to an impressionable two-year-old.

Then he sat under Grey's Monument and ate a bag of chips. He still wasn't entirely happy, but the chips were nice. 

A pigeon fluttered down a few feet away and eyed the chips, head on one side in a speculative fashion. He threw one towards it and the pigeon edged a bit closer.

"It's alright for you, isn't it?" he said. "Never have existential crises with a tiny little brain like that. You've got your priorities all sorted out - fly about a bit, land on things, steal somone's chips." 

The pigeon started demolishing the chip with its beak. 

"You build your little nest, hatch some eggs, get up every morning to catch some worms for the chicks. And that's all anyone ever expects from you, because you're just a pigeon. I bet you don't get people pestering you to go and be an elephant for a few days." He gave it another chip. "And if they did you'd just peck their face off because that's what you do when people annoy you. People who... people who find out what it is you were going to do." He stared at the pigeon through narrowed eyes. "You don't normally eat people's faces, do you? That's just self-defence. Like if someone found your nest. Or something else that you had hidden." The Doctor stood up.

"Have the rest of the chips," he told the bird. "And thank you."

\--

He went back to the supermarket when he was fairly sure everyone would be gone. He wasn't exactly armed and he wasn't really all that dangerous, but that had never stopped him before. He went to the office and started looking for something he should have looked for on the first day. 

"I thought you were sick." The Doctor looked up and saw Nigel watching him from the doorway. 

"I got better," he said, searching the desk for anything he might have missed. "Don't you go home, Nigel? Haven't you got a family?"

"I've got a few things to take care of first."

"I bet you have." The Doctor held up a collection of keys. "There's a lot of locked doors in this place, aren't there, Nigel? Lots of places to hide things in. Little place, big places. That massive storeroom no one seems to go into. Funny that, isn't it? That's why there's boxes all over the place. And you're the one that fills out all the supply forms. You fill them out with numbers that don't fit, which is why the delivery vans never drop off as much stuff as you'd expect them to. It's like someone's been telling lies about how much storage space we have. It's a good thing I've been distracted or I'd have wondered about that as soon as I got here. I just thought it was a Sainsburys thing."

He pushed past Nigel and walked to the service lift, pressing the button as the other man followed him. "There's something I want to take a look at in the basement. I expect you've seen it already but I haven't and I'd like to."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Nigel, as the lift opened and Doctor pulled him into it. "Are you sure you're not ill? You look a bit off-colour. I think you need a doctor."

"Don't you start that as well."

The doors opened onto the basement and the Doctor stepped out, dragging Nigel with him. "How long have you been here? On Earth, I mean? A few months? Not long enough to learn not to fall back on your old defences." They stopped outside the storeroom and the Doctor tried a few keys in the door. "Now, when the last manager did this you ate his face. I want you to promise not to do that to me, at least not right away. If you want you can do that thing where you explain the plan in vast detail before you kill me. Of course, it took Mr Burwell a bit longer to wonder what was down here. Not a very clever man, was he?" He found the key that fit the lock and turned it, pushing the door open into a dark expanse. "But I am a clever man, Nigel. A clever man with keys."

The Doctor switched the lights on and gave an appreciative whistle. "A secret robot army of death. That's... well, it's not entirely original but B+ for effort."

He prodded one the robots. "I like the design. Very retro. Have you thought about adding little smiley faces? That way they might not scare people as much." He whirled round suddenly, producing the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and brandishing it at the approaching alien. "Not the face. We talked about that, remember?" 

Nigel backed off slightly and the Doctor walked over to a large machine in the centre of the room.

"This how you control them? You don't mind if I have a look, do you?" He crouched down and poked around inside the machinery for a few moments. "It's very interesting. Bit MacGyvered, but then you have been working with some fairly limited technology. What's the plan, anyway? Take over the world?"

Nigel watched him carefully. "Why aren't you impressed?"

The Doctor shrugged. "I don't know, really. You're right, it is very impressive. If you've never seen anything like this before, but by now it should be fairly apparent that I have. Is that your real body, by the way?"

"No."

"Thought not. There must have been a real Nigel Singh at some point or you wouldn't have the right documentation. I had to cheat. Well, I say cheat but I mean use a time-machine. I expect you haven't got one of those. Not many people have."

"What are you?" 

The Doctor tilted his head, "How long have you got?"

"Longer than you have," said Nigel, "since I'm the one with the army of robots."

"That's a point, that is," agreed the Doctor. "I'll give you abridged version. It's quite romantic, really. There's this alien and he comes to Earth and he meets this woman. They fall beautifully in love and then they acquire a baby by the usual method. And then skip forward a bit and the same thing again except I'm not an alien anymore and I'm going to be better at it than they were. So as you can see I have a few issues that I still need to work through and consequently I might do something a bit rash."

The alien who was not really Nigel Singh stared the former alien who was not really Steven Foreman. "Are you trying to take over the planet too?"

"No, I'm just trying to raise a family. Your robot army idea might conflict with that, so I'm going to have to ask you not to do it."

"You can't just ask someone not to take over a planet." 

"Why not? I used to do it all the time. I admit that usually it doesn't work, but it's best to ask first on the off-chance. Less effort, for one thing."

"I don't really see how you can stop me."

"To be honest with you, neither do I. You have that secret robot army of death, for one thing. And I'm a bit rusty when it comes to saving planets. I haven't done it for years. What do I, Steven Foreman, manager of a Tesco Metro, bring to the equation? I think at first glance the answer is 'not much'." The Doctor started backing slowly towards the door. "And that's an entirely reasonable assessment of the situation. But there are a few things I've got that you haven't. Got a flat, friends, a job. Smile on my face and a song in my heart. I've got a wife; her name's Rose, she's lovely. You'd like her. I've got a little girl, she's two. I should be with them right now but instead here I am trying to foil your incredibly stupid plan that's probably going to get them killed if I don't stop you. Oh, and I've got your parabolic regulator," he added, running out the door and into the service lift.

As the lift doors closed, the Doctor pondered the wisdom of his own plan, such as it was. He might be about to get horribly killed in some way. That was a surprisingly terrifying prospect. He was out of the lift before the doors had finished opening.

He ran through the store, jumping over boxes and trying not to lose his footing in the darkness. He wondered how fast the thing behind him could move. 

He could hear it above the thump of one inadequate heart, imagined Rose dressed in black and full of anger. The sonic screwdriver got the automatic doors open just before he would have slammed into them and he kept running, out into the car-park.

Something hit him, dragging him down onto wet concrete. He was pushed over onto his back and he wondered if you'd lose consciousness if something started eating your face. Nigel punched him, which seemed a bit needlessly violent. 

"Two other things I've got," said the Doctor, tasting blood. "Backup, hopefully arriving quite soon." He dodged another punch and tried to find something in his pocket. "And a detonator."

The supermarket exploded. 

\--

"He'd have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky kids. And by 'pesky kids' I mean me and by 'it' I mean something involving a secret army of robots. Is it just me or are diabolical plans getting a bit less original these days?" 

"You didn't have to blow the place up." Robin Collins had turned up with the cavalry, which confirmed a number of suspicions.

The Doctor looked at the heap of burning rubble and shrugged. "It was only a Sainsburys."

"Even so-"

"Hoped there'd be some useful bits and pieces to pick up afterwards, didn't you? Lots of nice little gadgets that you shouldn't have. My Winifred's like that. One time she tried to eat one of her own shoes."

"I meant," said Collins, "that you didn't have to do it yourself." 

"Well, I got caught up in the moment."

"There was some disagreement over how far you'd go. I thought you might just walk away from the whole thing."

The Doctor looked at him with interest. "I thought about it," he said, carefully, "but I didn't want to let anyone down. I'm very big on my responsibilities. Speaking of which, I'd best be going."

"I'm going to want to debrief you."

"I don't feel that way about you, Mr Collins. And even if I did I've got a train to catch in two hours."

"Mr Foreman-"

"I've got things to get back to. Important things. Things that don't really go very well with doing favours for your organisation. I let things go a bit far tonight. Nietzsche said some very clever things about an abyss and I don't know how to live in two worlds without neglecting one of them. So I'm going to go now and hopefully I won't see you again. I've got a family and I want to get back to them and you don't have anything to offer that I could possibly want." He turned and started to walk away.

"Doctor..."

Steven Foreman didn't look back.


	4. A Tribe of Sparrows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor and Winifred have an adventure.

"I spy, with my x-ray eye..."

"You don't have x-ray eyes."

"How do you know?"

"Because you don't," said Winfred, with the unwavering confidence of a child.

"Well, anyway," said the Doctor, "I spy with my eye that's interesting and special in some undefined way..."

"It's brown. You've got brown eyes."

"So have you."

She nodded. "Because of gin attics."

"Genetics. Gen. Eticks."

"Gin ethics."

"That'll do. Anyway, as I was saying, I spy something beginning with S."

Winifred stood up on the bench and looked round the park. "Grass."

"No. That doesn't begin with an S, does it?"

"You could have lied."

"I didn't. And sit down in case you fall."

She sat down again and kicked her feet back and forth. "Sandwiches."

"What sort of sandwiches?"

"Lettuce."

"We've only got cheese," he said, offering one. 

"I don't want cheese."

"Alright. It's not the right answer anyway."

"Spoons."

"Where?"

"I don't know," she shrugged. 

"It's something in the park. That's the point of the game, isn't it?"

"I give up."

"Already?"

"Yes."

"It was 'starling'. That's a type of bird."

"Where is it?"

"It flew away."

Winifred frowned, "There's too many sorts of birds. Why do they have to have so many names?"

"So it doesn't get too repetitive when they get used in poem and prose. People like the imagery, they go on a lot about how birds are free, but really it's just that they can fly. I expect birds look down and think about how free they'd be if they knew how to make bread and if they didn't have to worry about cats. People think 'oh, birds aren't trapped on the Earth', but they are, they still need gravity and an atmosphere. And it wasn't birds who landed on the moon. Not first, anyway."

"That was America," said Winifred.

"Clever girl."

"I don't like birds anyway."

"Why not?"

"They've got little eyes. They look like they're dead but they move. And they have big flappy arms." She flapped her own arms to illustrate the point. "And then sometimes you see one in the road and it's all flat and people won't let you look at it. You do, but not other people." 

 

The Doctor nodded. "Other people are strange, aren't they?"

Something squawked above them and they looked up in time to see a large black bird slamming into the ground in front of the bench.

Winifred got up and poked at it with her foot. "It isn't flat," she said in a solemn and big-eyed way. “It’s a bit flat, but it doesn’t have car shapes on it."

“Maybe it was sick," he said taking her hand. 

"We could take it home," she said. 

“Nah, your mum wouldn’t like that." 

“She might. We could say it was a present."

“That’s not a very good present, is it? How would you like it if you got a dead bird for Christmas?"

Winifred thought about this for a moment. “I wouldn’t mind."

"You're a bit morbid," he said, laughing too quickly. “Anyway, that’d be doing a cat out of a good meal."

Winifred tugged on his hand and he followed her gaze up to a small flock of pigeons flying round and round in a tight circle, birds occasionally falling away and rejoining the formation.

“I didn’t know they did that."

“I think we should go home," he said.

\-- 

"...and so she was related to the Vikings too, because," he paused for effect, "the baby was her mother."

"I knew that," said Winifred.

"No you didn't."

"I did. Children are never in stories about grown-ups unless they're important. Like when that little boy turned people into zombies, or when that girl was a battle computer."

 

"You're in my stories," he protested. "The ones I tell other people. I'm always saying how clever you are."

"I must be important then."

"You are. You're very important."

"More important than the Prime Minister?"

"There's been lots of Prime Ministers, but there's only one of you. That makes you much more important." He tried not to see her as something ephemeral, something that could be missed entirely with the ill-timed flutter of an eyelid. She was small and fragile and things like that were never really safe. 

He tucked the covers round her, "Important people need their sleep," he said, switching off the lamp by her bed.

"Can we go to the park tomorrow?" she asked when reached the door. 

She looked so pale and tiny in the light spilling in from the hallway, and for a moment he could see her lifeless. His heart skipped a beat, but when he tried to say 'No' it came out as "We'll see what the weather's like."

\--

The light was huge and terrifying and burning into his brain. He could feel his pupils trying to close completely and a slight pressure on his face that moved like a thick and clammy spider. Something terrible and deadly was trying to drown him in light, burn out his mind, trying to evaporate him.

"It's sunny," said Winifred, holding his eyelids open with small but efficient fingers. 

He batted her hands away gently and rubbed at his eyes. "What?"

"You said we'd go to the park if the weather was nice and it is so can we go to the park I put my coat on and everything."

"You and I need to have a long talk about punctuation someday," he said sleepily.

"Please," she added, apparently as an afterthought.

He checked the alarm clock and sighed. "It's eight in the morning. On a Sunday." He did have to respect the dedication of a child who would wake up so early, check the weather, get dressed, and then try to wake her parents with the power of sunlight. It was still annoying though. "Go back to sleep."

Winifred shook her head, "Don't want to. You said we could go to the park."

"It's closed," he lied.

"Why's it closed?"

"It just is."

Winifred looked doubtful. "How do you know it's closed?"

"Because it is," he said. This was getting increasingly irritating. Dealing with children on a full-time basis might indeed be enough to drive people to insanity. Or at least to appearance of such, like when they wandered off in a department store and you were left there talking to yourself while they got involved in some inadvertent shoplifting. Rose stirred beside him and interrupted this train of thought. "And now you've woken your mother," he added.

"Why's she got her coat on?" asked Rose.

"We're going to the park," said Winifred.

"No, we're not," he insisted.

Rose poked him in the shoulder. "Did you say you'd take her to the park?"

"Yes," said Winifred, "he did say that." She widened her eyes in a suspiciously manipulative fashion. "Now he says it's closed."

"You promised her," said Rose. "Look how upset she is."

The Doctor stared at the ceiling and thought about the consequences of telling his wife that there might in fact be something alien and dangerous at the park. Based on the evidence of a few birds acting strangely. When she thought he was just trying to find an excuse to go back to sleep. The most sensible course of action probably was to mention his suspicions, but he got the feeling that she'd be incredibly angry if everything turned out to be perfectly normal and terrestrial. Which was entirely feasible. "It's eight in the morning," he managed.

"So it'll be nice and quiet, won't it?" Rose nodded at Winifred. "You go and watch the telly for a while and _you_ get dressed and take her to the park."

Winifred skipped away cheerfully and the Doctor admitted defeat. 

\-- 

The park was indeed closed. Closed, sealed, and cordoned off. The birds still circling, a larger flock now, casting a dark shape against the sky. A small number of army vehicles blocked the street at either end, soldiers milling about and waving people away. Someone had put barricades up around the park itself and there were two police cars, a fire engine and, bizarrely, an ice-cream van, which presumably had turned up for the weekend outings and stayed for the public sector consumers. 

The Doctor wondered how to get past the cordon and whether trying to was necessarily a good idea. This was, after all, the sort of thing he'd decided to take as a sign that he should take Winifred home and forget the whole thing. He could just let it be someone else's problem and then read about it in the paper once it was sorted out. Though he was fairly certain that what was actually going to appear in the newspaper wasn't going to be remotely true. He knew that he'd missed an awful lot of interesting events in the past five years, and he found it almost impossible to just go with the entirely sensible instinct to walk away from this one.

"Ah, Mr Foreman. I was wondering when you'd put in an appearance." The Doctor turned and saw Robin Collins walking towards them. Which made him even less willing to miss out on whatever was happening here. "And this must be little Winifred. Growing up fast, isn't she?"

"What's in the park, Mr Collins?"

"Unexploded German bomb. Not the sort of thing one wants to leave lying around."

"That would explain the birds then. Seagulls in particular being known for their attraction to mysteriously forgotten World War Two munitions."

"Do you want to take a look? She can come," he added, nodding at Winifred. "It's quite safe, as long as you know what you're doing."

"That's Whitehall for 'can you help me?'" the Doctor told Winifred. "It's quite a simple language despite its apparent complexity. Native speakers tend to use at least three times as many words as they need to, which can be confusing for the learner. Luckily most of them can communicate quite well in English, though they often like to pretend that they can't."

Winifred looked at Collins with interest. "Will there be dead birds?" she asked.

"I think there's an owl," he said, carefully.

 

"Oh, really?" asked the Doctor. "Anything else interesting?"

"Just the birds."

The Doctor looked at what he felt was quite a respectable military presence. "All this for some birds? Bit of an over-reaction, isn't it?"

Collins raised an eyebrow, "This is an area we like to keep an eye on. Some of the locals are quite interesting."

"Are they really?" The Doctor covered his daughter's ears. "I do think Mrs Anscombe's up to something behind her wife's back. Not that I listen to gossip, mind," he added, giving Winifred her hearing back. 

"Of course not. But are you interested in seeing what's in the park?"

"I've always been fascinated by imaginary leftovers from wars," said the Doctor, "so yes." He crouched in front of his daughter and looked at her seriously. "Winifred, I want you to stay close to me and don't touch anything and do ask questions. And if I tell you to run away, you do it. Understand?"

She nodded.

"Right," he said, standing up and taking her hand, "and when we get home we tell your mum we went to the library."

"Training her in the family business?" asked Collins.

"What, supermarkets?" He looked at his daughter. "What do you know about supermarkets, Winifred?"

"They bring happiness to many people," she recited, "and are a valuable part of our economy."

"Isn't she clever?" asked the Doctor, lifting her over the barricade and then jumping it to land next to her. "She knows all sort of things. Almost all of which are objectively true according to the modern understanding of the universe in which we find ourselves." He took her hand again. "I was thinking of teaching her French. Or German. Something European anyway."

"She's very advanced for her age," agreed Collins. "They say intelligence is a mix of environment and genetics. Which do you think is the more important in her case?"

"Oh, I expect she gets it from Rose. I didn't marry that woman for her looks, you know, although she is very beautiful as well. Winifred's got my eyes though, haven't you sweetheart?"

Winifred looked up at Collins and held an eye open with her free hand. "They're brown," she said.

They stopped in the middle of the park, standing in the dry grass and breathing warm summer air. 

"There's something under the ground," said the Doctor. "It's been here quite a while, because the ground isn't disturbed. I imagine it's probably a bit older than that bomb you made up."

"What do you think it is?"

"Well, I don't think it crashed, or if it did it's fairly intact. Might be a survey vessel monitoring long-term trends. Might be a probe being recalled."

"Recalled?"

"Well, its engines are firing up."

Collins looked at him curiously, "How do you know that?"

The Doctor pointed up at the circling birds.

"Magnets," said Winifred, helpfully.

"Clever girl," said the Doctor. "Magnets, Mr Collins. A magnetic field, which is the sort of thing that helps in a gravity-drive. One step up from lighting the blue touch paper and crossing your fingers. And," he continued, warming to the subject and to the feeling of being the only person with any understanding of what was going on, "that confused the birds, because they use the Earth's magnetic field to work out where they're going." He was quite proud of that little monologue. He hoped there was more where that had come from. 

"Wait," said Collins, "birds know about magnetic fields?"

The Doctor looked at him with the air of someone being confronted with incredible stupidity. "How did you think birds navigated? Did you think they had little maps that they hold in their little beaks and check every hundred miles?"

"They don't," said Winifred. "They use magnets."

"Anyway," he continued, "if you're in luck whatever's down there will just power up and fly off never to be seen again. Problem solved."

"And if luck's in short supply?"

"Have you ever read _War of the Worlds_?"

"I've seen the film."

"Which one?"

Collin shrugged. "It had Tom Cruise in it."

"Of course it did. The point being that it might not be all that benevolent. In which case you should probably come up with some sort of a plan since I do live round here and I'd hate to see the area trampled to bits by a massive alien death machine. Not that I think that's necessarily what'll happen, since I do know the difference between fiction and reality."

"Is there anyone in it?" asked Winifred, looking at the ground with fascination.

"Good question. If there is they're either very bored or in stasis." 

"Like those dinosaur people," said Winifred.

"Exactly," said the Doctor. He noticed Collins giving him a concerned look. "What? It was years ago and it's not like anyone's likely to believe her anyway."

"You are aware of the Official Secrets Act, aren't you, Mr Foreman?"

"Yes, but I signed it with another name. And a different face. Signed it with different DNA, actually. The hypothetical question then being that if DNA counts and I've signed it does that mean she's half signed it? Does that mean she only has to keep half the official secrets? That one of her X chromosomes has security clearance?"

Collins sighed. "Shall we ignore this and return to the matter at hand?"

"Yes, we shall. You realise someone's going to have to go down there?"

"How?"

"You could try digging. Dig a big hole and see what you find. There might be a door on it or something. Probably will be, actually, if there's anyone inside it. That'd be how they got in."

"Can I dig?" asked Winifred.

"No, you can't."

"Why not?"

"You're too short. You can't go into alien spaceships until you're at least-" He stopped. "Can you hear something?"

A low rumbling sound started building up on itself until the ground shook slightly. A piercing shriek emerged alongside it, getting louder and more insistent.

"I think we should stop standing here," said the Doctor, picking up Winifred. They ran across grass and concrete, arriving at the barricades again as something huge and metal emerged from under the park. It lifted up and hovered, bits of earth and concrete falling from the top. 

Then it fell, slamming back down into the ground. 

The Doctor looked thoughtfully at what was left of the park. "Mr Collins, I need you to do something for me."

"What would that be?"

He handed Winifred to the man from Whitehall. "Take her home."

\--

"I'm going to be sleeping on the couch for the next month or so, aren't I, Mr Collins?" said the Doctor, when Collins returned from his mission.

"Certain things were said that might seem to imply sanctions of some sort, yes."

He couldn't blame her. Not only had he gone looking for trouble, he'd taken Winifred with him, indulging the child's curiosity and hers as well. Find, investigate, interfere. Mirror. Signal. Manoeuvre. It was instinct that had never quite faded, like finding you could still swim after years on dry land. 

He looked at the still metal disc lying in its crater and wanted to know everything about it. 

"Its engines failed," he said. "If there's a hatch I can't see it. Probably just very well hidden. People do that sort of thing despite the obvious health and safety implications. Oh, and you're probably going to need another cover-story. This thing doesn't really look like it fell off the back of a Messerschmitt."

"Thanks."

"I'm not doing this for you," he said. "You merely happen to be here while I'm having a momentary failure of resolve. I'd take advantage of that if I were you."

"What do we do now, then?"

"Now, I wait until I think enough time's passed for my wife to have gone to her mother's. I need to get something from home and the best case scenario otherwise is me getting yelled at for three hours and I really can't be bothered with that right now."

"You don't seem very upset," noted Collins, studying him with affected disinterest.

"Odd, isn't it?" agreed the Doctor. He wasn't sure what to make of that himself. "Perhaps I'm repressing something." He checked his watch. "She should be almost there by now. If I don't come back you can assume I miscalculated. Don't touch anything." 

"Wouldn't dream of it."

\--

When he got home there was note from Rose on the kitchen table informing him that she'd gone to her mother's for the night and that he wasn't to try calling her. He tried anyway and got her voicemail. 

He hung up and headed to the bedroom. He'd made the effort, at least. People either left or they didn't, and there wasn't much he could do about it either way. She'd calm down by the morning and then he could deal with the situation with his own puzzle dealt with and her in a better mood. Besides, if she hadn't left him by now she wasn't going to. 

He collected the sonic screwdriver from a shoebox on top of the wardrobe and slipped it into his pocket. He could think of a few things in the TARDIS that might be handy, but that would just take longer and he was itching to get back to the park. 

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and stopped. He didn't look like someone who worked in a Tesco Metro. He looked alert and determined and not entirely tied to the Earth. Like someone who had taken down governments and started revolutions, someone who had seen things no one else had, someone who existed completely in the moment and knew that he had total control over what happened next.

The Doctor looked in the mirror and wondered where Steven Foreman had gone.

He anchored himself with Rose and Winifred and the set of his muscles altered subtly, giving themselves up to the gravity of the Earth.

"You," he told his reflection, "are an idiot."

\--

They stood in Jackie's kitchen, sharing the room with an uncomfortable silence. Jackie had taken Winifred out to get ice-cream in a gesture the Doctor suspected of having been Rose's idea. It didn't really seem like a good sign.

Rose put the kettle on and got a mug out from under the sink.

The Doctor tried to think of something to say. "I'm sorry," he said.

"No, you're not." Rose threw a teabag into her mug. "Are you going back to the park?"

"Yeah."

"So you've just come here to make yourself feel better."

This, he had to admit, was probably at least partly true. "No, I was worried about you. I should have told you what was going on. And I shouldn't have taken Winifred with me."

Rose stared at him. "I'm sure lots of people would take their four-year-old daughter to see an alien spaceship. I can see why you wouldn't think there was anything wrong with that."

"I didn't know what it was. I just thought there might be something going on."

"She said there were dead birds. Oh, and the army. She wanted me to take her back to see everything. It's alright that I had to say no, because she doesn't like me anyway." 

"She loves you."

"Doesn't mean she likes me. I'm not clever enough for her. I don't tell her stories about monsters and aliens."

"You could if you wanted to."

Rose threw the mug at him. He ducked and it smashed against the wall behind him. "You said she'd be normal! I wanted one bloody thing that wasn't weird and what did you give me? What is she?"

His mouth went dry. "She's our daughter," he said. 

The kettle boiled, unnoticed. "Don't tell me you haven't wondered," said Rose. 

"She's a bright and well-behaved little girl and most people would be happy about that."

"But what _is_ she?"

"She's human."

"Her mother's human. That's not the same thing." Rose realised what she'd said and stopped. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean... You know I didn't mean it like that."

He felt something icy curl itself around his gut. "Yes, you did," he said, in tone of perfectly calm. "Otherwise you wouldn't have said it."

"People just say things. It doesn't mean the things they say are true. You're human. I know that. She's human and you're human and both of you belong here."

Something hit him. "I've got to get back to the park."

"Give me the key first." She held out her hand.

He stared at her. "Rose... I know you're angry, and you've got every right to be. That thing's let something out that I didn't think was in me anymore. It's like it flipped a switch and I can't keep hold anymore. But I'm going to fix it and I'll be alright again. You can't just throw me out because-"

"Not that key."

"Oh." He took the TARDIS key from round his neck and handed it to her. "Yeah. Probably a good idea if you hold onto that for now."

"I just want to make sure you come back."

"I will," he said, and was fairly sure that he meant it.

\--

"Blow it up."

Collins looked at him as if he were mad. "What? I thought you wanted to look inside it."

"I did. That's because it wants me to. It's not just birds that thing messes with. It's a spy, Mr Collins. It's been under there for years listening and cataloguing and now it's been called back."

"So? It crashed. It's not going anyway." 

"But it's not dead. And it won't stop trying to leave. It'll start drawing things to it hoping they'll fix it. Not all of those things will be nice. Besides, it's giving me a headache. I don't take kindly to having my DNA unravelled by a machine."

The Doctor realised he shouldn't have said that when he saw the man's expression. "I think it recognised me. I'm a bit of a celebrity in some parts. I have lovely double helix, but does have visible seams where the base pairs meet. That thing tried to revert some of the alterations. It was trying to make itself a little friend."

"Your little girl was quite keen on having a look inside it."

The Doctor shrugged. "So were you. Human's not a synonym for stupid, you know. Other than colloquially." He looked down at the alien machine and tried not to want it. "I really would blow that thing up if I were you. Quite soon. You can say it was a doodlebug of unusual size. And shape. And origin."

"Can't we just switch it off?"

"Oh, go on. The military love destroying beautiful things. It's what they're there for."

"But-"

"Mr Collins, I'm currently trying to ignore a side of myself that's been known to blow up planets. It's getting quite difficult. I know you lot want the alien, but I don't and I might get a bit angry if you don't just take my advice and get rid of that thing. Now. And so I'm going to stay here until you do that." He rubbed a hand over his eyes. "And then I'm going to go home and sleep until my genes shrink to fit." 

\--

He'd given her another name, one that no one else knew. It was constructed from parts that didn't belong with each other, and it was sentimental and stupid of him she probably wouldn't be able to pronounce it anyway. 

That was what he'd passed on: a dead name and altered alleles.

"She's got your eyes," said Rose, watching Winifred string daisies together.

"Eyes are quite useful," he agreed. "I think on balance it's better to have them than not."

It was a lovely day. They'd had to take the bus to get to a park that hadn't just been the victim of a controlled explosion, but the Doctor felt that this was quite acceptable for a family day out. The grass was warm underneath him and the sun was doing its thing with unusual abandon.

"I told Tesco I had leprosy," he said.

Rose laughed. "Liar."

"How do you know I didn't?" He leaned over and kissed her. "Do you think your mum would take Winifred for the night?"

"Hormones kicking in again, are they?"

"I just think we should spend some time together without having to worry about our little parasite. Me and you and no one else. And yes, they are." 

Winifred came back with feather stuck in her hair and trailing daisies.

"Your grandmother wants you to visit her tonight," he told the girl. "She wants to talk to you about your uncanny ability to interrupt a romantic moment."

"Will she let me stay up late?"

"That depends how easily I can bribe her with Tesco vouchers. Here," he said, "I've got something for you. I was going to give it to you on your birthday, but you might as well have it now."

"Is it a puppy?"

"Sadly, no." He took the key from round his neck and put it on Winifred. Rose gave him a look he couldn't quite decipher.

"It's just an old key," he said. "I don't need it anymore."


	5. Nest Egg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it all goes horribly wrong.

"My teacher's an alien," said Winifred, casually announcing the discovery to her parents over fishfingers and chips. 

Rose managed not to drop her fork. "Don't be daft."

"He is," she insisted. "No one else knows. I think it's a secret." 

"He isn't. I've met Mr Finch and he's not an alien." She looked pointedly at her husband. "Tell her not to be so silly."

The Doctor shrugged. "I've never met her teacher."

"So?" 

"So how do I know he isn't?"

"Use your common sense?"

He sighed. "I think it's incredibly unlikely that your teacher's an alien," he told his daughter.

Rose glared at him. "Steven."

"Rose."

Winifred looked at her parents. "Are you going to have an argument?" She seemed more curious than concerned.

"We don't have arguments," said Rose. "Sometimes we have discussions, but that's not the same as arguments. Now eat your chips and stop making up stories."

\--

Rose left the topic again until Winifred was in bed. Then, on the sofa in front of the News At Ten, she said, "This is your fault."

"What? Train strikes?" he asked mildly.

"She thinks her teacher's an alien. Where d'you think she got that from?"

"Science-fiction?" 

Rose could tell he was trying to avoid getting into anything, and it irritated her. She switched off the television. "We need to talk about this."

"Are we going to have an argument? It's just that you should probably leave the telly on if we are, because it might drown out of those words it might be best not to teach Winifred just yet."

"You call all our discussions arguments."

"No, the dictionary calls them that. You just refer to them by a euphemism."

Rose shifted uncomfortably. "We don't argue."

"We do," he said, calmly. "Everyone knows that. When I'm at work people check for my wedding ring, and Julie on check-out three keeps trying to get me to have sex with her. She says I can't have had any for months. She's right, but that's not really the point, is it?"

"Julie Morrison? With the legs and too much make-up?" She looked at him with some suspicion.

"Have I done something?" he asked, ignoring the question entirely. "Is it that I _haven't_ done something? Did I miss a birthday? An anniversary? As unlikely as it is did I miss Christmas? Did I belittle you in some way? Did I accidentally call you fat? What is it?"

"You know what it is," she said. "You keep telling Winifred things she doesn't need to know about. It was alright when she was younger but she's at school now and she can't just go round talking about aliens. People might start to wonder. People might find out we're lying."

"We're not lying."

"We are. I used to be able to forget about that and now I can't." She bit her lip. "You need to stop telling her all those stories." 

"Will that make you happy?" he asked after a moment.

She nodded. "It's a start." 

\--

Rose didn’t like to be reminded that her life wasn’t average. She didn’t like to have to deal with the fact that she’d married a man who used to be an alien.

He’d tried, she had to give him that. He’d given her the part of him that could give her the life she wanted, had changed himself to be what she’d never quite managed to ask for. Words like 'family' and 'home' made him happy, and she could forget that he lost both those things before he even met her. Or rather, she _had_ been able to, but this was becoming increasingly difficult over time. 

She found that as their daughter had grown older, he and Winifred had formed a sort of feedback loop, amplifying the unusual and leaving her out without ever meaning to. Last Saturday the two of them had taken the toaster apart so that Winifred could see how it worked.

He told the girl about things that they’d agreed to leave behind. Things that Rose needed to pretend had never happened. 

Remembering those things brought stuff to the surface, like the fact that a part of _her_ hadn’t wanted to abandon that old life. The price was too high, and she knew that, but sometimes she wondered if she’d been wrong about that. They’d got too reckless and she’d lost Mickey, but she’d been young and terrified when she told the Doctor that she wanted to leave because of that. 

And he’d been needy. It was better hidden after he’d regenerated, and she’d enjoyed pretending that he only stayed with her because he loved her. She should have seen it though, how desperate he was and how far he’d go to keep her. How easily he could slip into changing things to suit himself and how quickly he could assume that the same applied to her. 

She had created categories in her mind when he gave her what he thought she wanted (and she _had_ wanted it, which somehow made it worse). He’d changed soon enough after Mickey’s death that she could leave the blame with the Doctor and love Steven instead, because she knew that he’d never have let that happen. Steven was hers, something the Doctor had made for her so she wouldn’t have to carry that anger and he wouldn’t have to deal with it.

And then Winifred had brought the Doctor back. It had happened slowly, or perhaps Rose had just taken much too long to notice what was happening. She thought of it as like attracting like, because sometimes when she looked into Winifred’s eyes she saw the Doctor looking back at her. 

And she still, deep down, resented him. He’d robbed her of the chance to forgive him, meddled with his own DNA and made her lose something he should have given her time to come to accept. She should have said no when he offered to change. She should have let him talk her into staying. She should have listened to her mother seven years ago.

Because they were only lying. So none of it was real.

\--

The Doctor hoped that no one had twigged onto the fact that he went to the freezer aisle when he wanted some time alone. It was the way that people didn't like to stand there for too long, which he felt was either because it was cold or because frozen chicken was something of a reminder of one's own mortality. Either way people didn't tend to hang about and he could stand there trying to look deeply immersed in official Tesco thoughts. Tesco Value thoughts, perhaps, which weren't as good but were a better deal for that penny people were always offering for them. 

He noted that as one of the worst comparisons he'd ever come up with.

It was also the most incredibly mundane place he could think of, which meant that it was very difficult to forget which planet he was on. He'd been spending a lot of time with the frozen goods lately, which made him worry, which in turn made him spend even more time there. He couldn't talk to Rose, because that would mean showing her the cracks in his vast citadel of self-delusion. The one person he could have discussed it with was Alistair, but he was dead now and the Doctor was trying not to think that this was the point at which things started going wrong in his own mind. He'd lost a tether and it meant he had to try even harder not to float away.

Sometimes he thought he could feel everything in the universe falling apart through expansion, gravity trying and failing to hold it all together. It scared him because it meant he had to stop and concentrate on who he was, which meant looking at the increasingly obvious fact that he'd never really had any idea where the Doctor ended and Steven Foreman began. 

He was having a belated existential crisis and there wasn't really anyone he could talk to about it. 

Except there was. Memories had become stories and there was a part of him that had never really stopped being the Last of the Time Lords, capital letters and all. He'd made sure he'd be the last, consigned the planet to death by loss of gene pool, and moved on. He'd always known he'd have to lie to Winifred, and he'd just kept putting it off. 

He just wasn't sure if he could kill Gallifrey again.

\--

"I want a story," said Winifred.

The Doctor, who was trying not to be himself, sat down on the edge of the bed. "I don't really know any stories. There's fairytales, but they're mostly horrible. It's all death and sorrow and... things you're to young to know about. The women aren't very good role models and you're not old enough for the Angela Carter versions."

"You know lots of stories," she said. "True ones. About monsters and aliens and all the places you've been to."

"Winifred," he said. "That's not... none of that's real." And there, he'd said it, and it wasn't that difficult after all. "They're just stories. You know that, don't you?"

She just looked at him, silent and completely awake. 

"And I don't think it's a good idea to keep telling you that stuff. So I'm not going to. And maybe you'll miss it at first, but after a while you'll just forget all about it." He stared at the key lying on her bedside table. "You'll stop seeing aliens every time you walk past a shop window, and you won't think of explosions when you see a baseball bat. You're only little. There's all sorts of things you need to make room in your head for. So I shouldn't have filled it up with things that aren't real." He smiled at her. "That's one thing you'll need to learn. That I'm quite a strange person."

"I don't think you're strange."

"That's because I've warped your fragile mind," he joked, and then realised that it was true. "Do you want a puppy?" he asked, stumbling on his own thoughts. "You could give it a name and we could take it for walks. A little labrador one, maybe. Nothing vicious or stupid. You don't want a dog that bites people and then tries to eat its own legs. Mongrels are cleverest," he said, and cursed his tongue for being faster than his brain, "but I don't think your mum would want one of those." He felt like he'd stepped into quicksand. "I'm sure she'd love it anyway, though. You could throw sticks and it'd bring them back to you. I don't know why you'd do that, but you could if you wanted to. Then it might start bringing you sticks as a present." He caught a breath and managed to make himself stop talking. 

"Can I go to sleep now?" asked Winifred. "It's nearly nine o'clock."

"It is, isn't it? Funny where the time goes." He kissed her forehead and stood up. "Think about that puppy idea," he said, switching the light off. 

Rose met him in the hallway and nodded. "That was good," she said. She kissed him and he tried not to feel like she was the only thing he had left.

\--

She had a few hours each day where she didn't have to feel like the spare parent. As she waited for Winifred outside the school she wondered if this was normal, if the other mother's occasionally felt like they didn't really matter. She couldn't really imagine choosing between parents, because she'd only ever had one herself. She tried to remember how some of the people she'd gone to school with had related to their families and imagined being the parent who was grudgingly visited on weekends. There wasn't any doubt in her mind that it'd go that way if she couldn't work things out at home and decided to just cut her losses. Winifred would choose, and Rose knew that she wouldn't choose the one who couldn't answer her questions about how magnets worked or why you only ever saw one side of the moon. 

She knew there was a part of her that couldn't quite love the girl as much as she wanted to. She'd always been worried that Winifred would be taken from her, that her daughter would turn out to be something strange and alien. So she held back a bit, always slightly scared of her own child. And that made her angry with herself, because she shouldn't feel like that. It wasn't normal to feel like that.

She felt a tug on her sleeve and looked down to see Winifred staring up at her. 

"You didn't see me," said the girl. "I was all quiet and you missed me."

"I've got you now though," she said, taking her daughter's hand. "How was school?"

"It was alright. We did reading and some sums and we got to colour in pictures."

"Did you learn anything interesting?"

"Not really." They walked quietly for a few minutes, and Rose could tell the girl blamed her for ending the stories about aliens. She didn't want to have to explain all the reasons that they had to stop, because that would mean admitting that they were true.

"Do you want some crisps?" she asked when the silence got too much for her. "We could get crisps."

Winifred shrugged. "I don't mind."

Rose licked her teeth and tried to work out how to fix things. "I know a lot of things don't make much sense when you're little, but they will when you get bigger."

Winifred looked up at her. "What sort of things?"

"Lots of things. I suppose grown-ups do things you don't understand sometimes. When I was your age I could never understand half the things my mum did." 

"Nadira says if your parents argue that means they have to get divorced. Mandy said that isn't true but she can't add up properly. I said you just had discussions and Nadira said that's worse."

Rose met the girl's gaze, which seemed more curious than concerned. "Sometimes we don't agree about things," she said, "but that doesn't mean we don't love each other. And Nadira's just silly. Me and your dad are happy, it's just sometimes we don't agree, that's all."

"Will you always live together?"

"Yeah," said Rose, because it was probably true. Winifred had kept them here and she had kept them together. So soon that little girl had come along, before they'd really had time to think properly. Winifred would always have to live somewhere, and neither one of them would ever leave her. 

\--

"My wife doesn't understand me," said the Doctor. "Well, actually she does. If anything's the problem it's that. But on television people always say their wife doesn't understand them so I thought I should say that in case it's traditional or something." He wasn't entirely sure what he was doing in Julie Morrison's flat, but he suspected it couldn't possibly end well. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm just not very good at adultery."

"Talking isn't adultery," said Julie. "Adultery's when you have sex with someone other than the person you're married to. Although kissing would probably count as well. We could start with that and work up to the other thing?"

"Well, by the Biblical definition, pre-marital sex counts as well. So I have committed adultery in that sense, although not with you, obviously. But you know that, because you'd have been there if I had." He realised he was rambling. "Sorry, it's just that when I'm nervous I keep talking until I think of something to do. That's quite a long-standing habit of mine and I find it quite useful sometimes, although people tell me it's annoying. I can be quite an irritating person at times, though I think I've mellowed a bit in the past few years. Do you find me irritating?"

Julie kissed him.

"I assume that's a 'no' then? Or do you just find it endearing? I think Rose does. Sorry, I suppose I shouldn't mention her right now, should I?" He was acutely aware of how much he was apologising. He stopped himself before he could apologise for that as well. "You're quite sexually aggressive, aren't you?" he said, tilting his head instinctively as her mouth moved to his neck. "Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I thought I should mention it. I don't know why. Perhaps I'm trying to allay my guilt by thinking of myself as a passive casualty of your desires. I know that sounds sexist, but I'd be thinking the same thing if you were a man. Not that I think you're a man. You're quite clearly a woman."

Julie detached herself and looked at him. "Are you high?"

"No, I'm just a bit unsure of my own motives. I'm not really the type to sleep with someone for my own emotional validation." He thought about this for a moment. "Look, I know it's rude to leave a lady frustrated, but I think I should go home. It's not that you're not attractive or anything, because you are, although possibly you should work on your self-esteem in other areas since you do seem to lean a bit too much on your own ability to get people into bed with you."

"...right."

"I'm not impotent," he added, having a belated crisis about his own masculinity. "I'm just a bit strange."

\--

“I tried to commit adultery," he said when Rose turned away from him again that night.

Rose turned over and looked at him with what appeared to be calm interest. He wasn’t sure what reaction he’d been expecting, but this seemed far too understated to be a good thing.

“What do you mean ‘tried’?" she asked. 

“I think I wanted to see if I could. I’m not actually sure." He had an rough idea though; he'd been trying to test himself, to see how much he'd changed. Having an affair had seemed like the human thing to do, so he'd made an attempt to have one. Even that hadn't really settled anything, because perhaps Steven Foreman just wasn't the type to do that sort of thing, even at a low ebb. 

Which was another problem, because if there was a real Steven Foreman he wouldn't have to worry about having blown up Gallifrey, and the Doctor wasn't sure anymore that he _was_ that unreal person.

“You did to upset me," said Rose. "Otherwise you wouldn’t have told me. This way you make yourself feel better about it and still let me know that you’re not happy."

“It’s not-“

“Why does everything have to be about you?" she asked, her tone bitter. 

“How can everything be about me? I don’t even know who I am anymore."

“I don’t who you are either. I’m not sure I ever really did."

“Rose…"

She turned away again. “I’m going to sleep."

\--

She wasn't angry. She should have been, but she wasn't. She was quite calm about it, really. He was slipping and he had been for some time. And she'd asked him to let go so that she could hold on, so that she could keep the part that was falling away. The part that was quite capable of calm revenge, of working out what would hurt someone and then doing it just because he could. 

She'd always thought that two hearts meant he cared more, when really it just meant that if one broke he had another to tide him over until it healed. The second heart might have gone, but its ghost was still in him, beating away out of synch with the human one. And he had, whatever a stethoscope might claim, created an identical one in Winifred. The child he'd given Rose was unearthly, however human she might appear to be. 

Both of them could hurt her accidentally and never even notice because she wasn't quite in their world. No matter how much they cared about her they'd always leave her out. 

She felt so lonely.

\--

They sat on the swings in the park, throwing chips to the birds. “My teacher’s not really an alien," said Winifred. 

The Doctor watched a seagull swallow a chip whole. “Is that really what you think or is it what you think I want to hear?"

Winifred kicked her legs, setting her swing into gentle motion. “Are you and mum getting a divorce?"

“You’re not supposed to answer a question with another question," he said mildly. 

“I’ll answer your question if you answer mine."

He had to admit that he was quite impressed by that. “You first then."

“No."

“Winifred…"

“You won’t tell me if I say first. I know you won’t." 

“Alright." He tried to work out whether he wanted to lie to her, and decided to go with honesty. “I don’t know. I hope not. I don’t think you mum’s very happy right now. I’m not sure why." 

Winifred nodded thoughtfully. “Are you happy?"

“That’s two questions. You didn’t say I had to answer two questions."

“It was a surprise," said Winifred. “Are you?"

“Happiness is a very complicated thing," he told her, “it isn’t always a case of being either happy or unhappy. Now, tell me about your teacher."

“He’s an alien."

“Are you sure?"

“Yes."

“How do you know he’s an alien?"

“He just seems wrong. He doesn’t belong. Like you."

The Doctor looked at his daughter. “I’m not an alien," he said, carefully.

“That’s why you’re not happy," she said. “You are an alien and you’re not and that’s strange. Mr Finch is a bit like that, like he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to be. I don’t think anyone else knows, but that’s probably because they haven’t met any aliens or people that used to be aliens. If they had I think they’d know."

“Your mum’s met aliens and she doesn’t think he is one."

“She doesn’t want to see them," said Winifred, hopping off her swing. The sudden movement scattered the birds into the air with angry squawks. 

“You’re far too clever," he said, pulling himself to his feet. He worried about what he’d turned her into and tried not to let the concern show. 

“Is that because of genetics?"

He hoped not. He watched her standing there and for a moment he saw another child, a little boy who couldn’t possibly be left upon the Earth. “It’s not all genes," he said. “There’s all sorts of things that make people the way they are. Where you grow up, how your parents treat you, what you watch on TV. What you had for dinner last Thursday, what they teach you at school." He thought about that last part. “Education’s very important," he said, taking her hand. Her single pulse was clear and strong and something that he tried to attach significance to.

She skipped along beside him as they left the swing-park area. “If I get a puppy can we teach it to do tricks?"

“If you want. I suppose that’s what they’re for, really. That and having something to talk to."

They left the chips for the birds.

\--

Winifred didn’t go to school the next day, having contracted a mysterious illness with no obvious symptoms. She sat at home with her mother and watched daytime TV instead. 

Rose thought about all the things in her life that weren’t quite normal, and the chances of them ever being that way again.

She thought about change. 

\--

He called them from Tesco, because he didn’t want Rose finding out. He locked himself in the office and tried all the phone numbers he could remember. He even tried Geneva, on the basis that he had indeed saved General Bambera from her own nuclear device that one time and you might as well go right to top if you could. 

No one would take his calls. His emails bounced back with error messages that didn’t actually fit with what he knew as the genuine state of affairs. 

The direct approach having failed, he hacked into their website and searched until he found the file he wanted. 

_Finch, M._ with the annotation _Current post: NEST EGG_

The Doctor paused to reflect that UNIT had quite an appalling inability to be opaque, all things considered. At least the information was quite hard to get at if you didn’t know a few tricks that no one had thought of yet and weren’t the sort of person who would, hypothetically, have made a mental note of some relevant bits and pieces after they’d been declassified in a few decades. 

But if you were, then it was a fairly simple matter to get to _Foreman, W_. 

He read the file carefully twice over, a hard calm settling over him as he did so. There were some names he wasn’t happy to see on the list of contributions, but none of them really shocked him. Long-term planning was important, and he understood that better than most people ever could. 

He read a recent critique of his own domestic situation and didn’t click on the link that offered a DNA analysis of a few of the relevant people. He noted the probably alien origin of the small piece of metal that had followed his daughter since she got her MMR vaccination.

He called Rose on his mobile and thought about how easy it would be to take down the entire organisation. He knew exactly how to do it. 

He also knew that they had a point. He'd given up saving the world and someone had to fill in for him. If that meant planning ahead, they'd do it. Everyone was replaceable, and Winifred was her father's daughter. Twenty years or so and they'd have someone who might be prepared to help out. It was more or less exactly what he'd have done himself. It was more or less what he _had_ done, setting up the opportunity by failing to realise that you couldn't become human by putting on a human skin. Sometimes, no matter what you did, things just refused to go the way you wanted them to. 

Maybe he should have learned that from his parents.

\--

When he got back Rose was leaving the flat, a key on a chain swinging in her hand. 

"We're leaving," he said. He reached for the key and she snatched it away from him.

"I'm going to fix it," she said. "I'm going to make things better."

"Rose..."

"No. It's over. I want things to be like they were before."

"It's alright. We'll go somewhere else. There's lot of places." He didn't really mean it but thought that he should say it anyway.

"If you go into that thing you'll change. It wants you back. I know it does. And then you won't want this anymore."

"I will."

"You won't. That's why you changed. And don't tell me it's not true because it is. I saw it two years ago. I should never have let you do it in the first place."

"You can't just change the past," he said.

"We used to."

"It'd be a paradox. Paradoxes are never a good idea." He wondered, in an odd, detached way, why that was the only thing was worried about. 

"There is one way," she said, twirling the TARDIS key in her fingers. "I could make a wish. Get us a second chance."

"We might just do the same thing all over again."

"I'll make sure that we don't," she said, and he knew she'd make it true. "Aren't you going to stop me?"

"I don't do that stuff anymore," he said, quietly.

Winifred appeared on the doorstep, watching her parents as if she were trying to put together a jigsaw.

"Tell her a story," said Rose. "One with a happy ending."


End file.
